Rumble Roses XX Review

Date: 4/7/2006

Rumble Roses XX is at once a new wrestling game for the Xbox 360, a demo
designed to show off a next-gen system’s ability to realistically portray
bouncing breasts, and a junior high school boy’s fantasy. To cover these last
two aspects, Rumble Roses XX provides wrestling ladies that cover the spectrum
of fetish stereotypes. You’ve got a demure school teacher, an ornery cowgirl,
a sexy nurse, a bad girl punk, a school girl, a leather-clad dominatrix, and
the list goes on. All are of course quite amply compensated from a mammary
perspective and can’t take a step without gyrating something. All of this is
well and good, but what about the wrestling?

Yowza.

Well it is obvious that most of this title’s development effort went into
building the wrestlers and less into the game itself. The actual wrestling is
not too bad, but it’s not really that deep either. There’s one attack button and
it is used with the left stick to execute both punches and kicks and another
button initiates a grappling move. The right bumper performs a block and if you
hit an attack button while blocking your opponent’s attack you’ll perform a
reversal and turn the tables on your attacker. Successful strikes fill a special
meter that once full enables a special signature attack. Pulling off one of
these is a no-brainer – once the meter’s full you just need to press the left
bumper. There’s also a “Humiliation Meter” that fills when you string together
attacks. Fill this meter and a trigger pull will unleash a special “Humiliation
Attack” designed to make the other lady feel decidedly less of one. Lastly
there’s a button to initiate a pin, and breaking out of a pin or hold is done by
feverishly mashing all of the buttons.

When you’re new to the game you may find yourself taking a beating at first
and losing more than your share of matches. Soon enough though you’ll figure out
the basic strategy for the matches and after that you’ll hardly ever lose a
bout. This transition from punching bag to dominator happens pretty quickly,
after which you’ve got the game figured out and it loses its challenge. Once you
reach this point the only real motivation to keep playing is to try to earn
enough of the in-game equivalent of money to buy all of the swimsuits and
costumes available in the game’s store. There are no story or career modes to be
found here; just an obscure quest to reach a popularity rating of 100. You reach
this rating pretty quickly and when you do it’s a mystery as to what it means.
Keep playing at this level and eventually you’ll get a title fight at a random
moment, but you won’t know when it’s coming or why. The game is no help on these
points as feedback is non-existent and the manual doesn’t provide any clues.

In fact the whole game is held together by a bare-bones and obscure menu and
navigation system. It would have been nice for the developers to put a little
effort into the game’s presentation outside of the matches. It seems as if they
figured that people would buy the game for the women no matter how minimal and
confusing the interface, so why bother putting any work into it? You’re
presented with a 2D “map” which has little icons that represent the game’s small
handful of arenas, the store, a “locker room” where you can change outfits and
save your game, and Xbox Live gaming. There’s also a tutorial area that plays
short video lessons on each of the game’s in-match actions, but it is completely
non-interactive and doesn’t really do much of a job of teaching players how to
play the game. When you enter a match your opponent is always randomly selected
– there are no ladders, standings, etc. – and even the type of match is random
so you may find yourself in a tag team fight whether or not you want it.